Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief
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The failure of Hood’s campaign and the fall of Savannah brought down a new torrent of censure on Davis’s head. The replacement of Johnston with Hood was the cause of the disaster, claimed the Richmond Examiner. In fact, declared the editor, “every misfortune of the country is palpably and confessedly due to the interference of Mr. Davis.” Several members of Congress echoed Senator Louis Wigfall’s denunciation of Davis as “an amalgam of malice and mediocrity.”4 One of Davis’s supporters lamented that the president “is in a sea of trouble. . . . It is the old story of the sick lion who even the jackass can kick without fear.” Ordnance Chief Josiah Gorgas, although a friend and confidant of Davis’s, deplored the plight of the Confederacy under his leadership. “Where is this to end?” Gorgas wondered. “No money in the Treasury, no food to feed General Lee’s Army, no troops to oppose Gen. Sherman. . . . Is the cause really hopeless? Is it to be abandoned and lost in this way? . . . When I see the President trifle away precious hours [in] idle discussion & discursive comment, I feel as tho’ he were not equal to his great task. And yet where could we get a better or a wiser man?”5
Many believed that a wiser and better man was available: General Robert E. Lee. Pressure mounted on Davis to appoint Lee as general-in-chief with virtually dictatorial powers that would, in effect, usurp the president’s authority as commander in chief. Davis likewise faced demands for the restoration of Johnston to command of the remnants of the Army of Tennessee. Mixed with these pressures were a welter of rumors and speculations about a wholesale reshuffling of the cabinet, the resignation of Davis, even a coup d’état to remove him from office. “There are rumors of revolution, and even of the displacement of the President by Congress, and investiture of Gen. Lee,” recorded one diarist breathlessly. “Revolution, the deposition of Mr. Davis, is openly talked of!” reported another.6
In the midst of this ferment came news of the fall of Fort Fisher on January 15, which closed Wilmington, North Carolina, as the last port for blockade runners bringing supplies for Lee’s army. As the noose tightened around the Confederacy’s neck, on January 16 the Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the appointment of Lee as general-in-chief. The Virginia legislature sent Davis a similar resolution the following day. The president adroitly replied that he too had great confidence in Lee and was quite willing to give him command of all Confederate armies if Lee thought it compatible with his duties as field commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. The same day Davis offered Lee the position, knowing that he would decline, thus taking some of the sting out of the passage by the House that day of a bill creating the position of general- in-chief. A War Department official declared that the bill “is very distasteful to the President.” But “it is a question whether he will have the hardihood to veto it.”7 Davis signed it, however, and named Lee to the post on February 1. This time the general reluctantly accepted, with the apparent understanding that he would exercise his powers minimally, without infringing on the president’s prerogatives as commander in chief.8
• • •
THIS DENOUEMENT TEMPORARILY LANCED THE BOIL OF dissension in Richmond. At the same time, the issue of negotiations to bring the war to an end was coming to a head. Ever since Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in November, the North’s purpose to fight on to victory or exhaustion was clear. And it was also clear that the side closest to exhaustion was the Confederacy. Inflation and shortages had destroyed its economy; its armies were reeling in defeat; desertions had become epidemic; malnutrition and depressed morale prevailed among soldiers and civilians alike. A longing for peace spread over the South. A supporter of Davis told him in January that “making all proper allowances for habitual croakers, & personal dissatisfactions, I must express the deliberate conviction that there exists now an amount of conflict & despondency, which threatens to disintegrate & destroy our Government. Day by day things are growing worse.”9 The Georgia and Alabama legislatures passed resolutions calling for negotiations. Several congressmen introduced similar resolutions. Vice President Alexander Stephens once again pressed Davis to pursue any possible avenue toward peace.10
Davis had no faith in such a pursuit. He knew that Lincoln would insist on reunion and emancipation as the sine qua nons of peace. Davis continued to insist that the Confederacy could achieve independence by outlasting the North’s willingness to continue fighting. But he could not ignore the pressure for negotiations. He must at least appear willing to explore any opportunity for peace.
Such an opportunity opened up in the form of a letter from Francis Preston Blair at the beginning of 1865. A prominent Jacksonian Democrat during the 1830s and 1840s, Blair had been a political ally and friend of Davis’s. They had parted company when Blair helped found the Republican Party and became a sort of elder statesman in the Lincoln administration. He persuaded Lincoln to allow him to go to Richmond under a flag of truce as a “wholly unaccredited” agent to seek an interview with his old friend in the Confederate White House. The ostensible purpose was to obtain the return of papers looted by Confederate soldiers from Blair’s home in Silver Spring, Maryland, when Maj. Gen. Jubal Early’s Confederate troops raided to the outskirts of Washington the previous July. The real purpose, conveyed in a private letter to Davis, was to see if they could find common ground to end the war.11
Davis and Blair met for several hours in Richmond on January 12. Blair presented his personal plan for peace: a cease-fire between Union and Confederate forces followed by an alliance to drive the French out of Mexico, where Louis Napoleon had installed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as emperor. Davis was skeptical about this audacious scheme, but he did not rule it out. The two men agreed to disagree, however, on the nature of such an alliance: Blair saw it as a step toward the return of the South to the Union; Davis perceived it as an agreement between two nations. Davis gave Blair a letter for Lincoln in which he agreed to appoint commissioners to a meeting with Union commissioners “with a view to secure peace to the two countries.”12
Blair went back to Washington with this message. Lincoln had no interest in Blair’s Mexican adventure. But he too wanted to keep alive the chance for peace. He authorized Blair to return to Richmond with a letter offering to receive any agents Davis “may informally send to me, with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.”13 After meetings with his cabinet and with Vice President Stephens, Davis decided to send a commission despite the difference between “the two countries” and “our one common country.”
Stephens had been one of the president’s most persistent critics, and to get him off his back Davis named him one of the three commissioners. The others were Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice, and Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia. All three had urged negotiations; Davis was sure that the process would founder on the one country/two countries impasse, so he wanted his commissioners to be personal witnesses to Lincoln’s “intransigence” as a way to convince the Southern people that independence could be achieved only by military victory.14
Alexander H. Stephens
Davis asked Secretary of State Judah Benjamin to draft instructions to the commissioners. Benjamin fudged the difference between one country and two countries by referring to Davis’s offer to negotiate and instructing them to seek a conference with Union agents “upon the subject to which it relates.” That would never do, said Davis. He restored “the two countries” language in the instructions. Benjamin shook his head and predicted that “the whole thing will break down on that very point.”15
If it had not been for the intervention of General Ulysses S. Grant, it would indeed have broken down. Lincoln had ordered Union officers not to allow the commissioners to cross the lines unless they agreed to his “one common country” letter as the basis for a meeting. Davis’s “two countries” instructions seemed to preclude a conference. By this time, however, the press in both North and South was full
of speculation about the prospect of peace. The failure of the commissioners at least to meet would produce a huge letdown. Grant talked informally with Stephens and Hunter and telegraphed the War Department that he believed “their intentions are good and their desire sincere to restore peace and union. . . . I am sorry however that Mr. Lincoln cannot have an interview with [them]. . . . I fear now their going back without any expression from anyone in authority will have a bad influence.”16
This telegram caused Lincoln to come personally to Fort Monroe, where he joined Secretary of State William H. Seward for a meeting with the three Confederate commissioners on February 3. The four-hour meeting on a boat at Hampton Roads produced just what Davis expected—and probably wanted. Lincoln insisted on three conditions for peace: “1 The restoration of the National authority throughout all the States. 2 No receding by the Executive of the United States, on the Slavery question. . . . 3 No cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government.”17 Three days earlier the United States Congress had passed—and Lincoln had signed—the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery, so condition number 2 would mean the end of the South’s peculiar institution.
The commissioners had no authority to accept any of these conditions, so they went home empty-handed. Their report to Davis contained only a bare-bones summary of the discussion. Davis, in order to fire up Southern resentment and determination to resist, wanted them to add some words about Lincoln’s insistence on humiliating terms. They refused, so on February 6 Davis provided such language in his message sending the report to Congress, which he also released to the press. Lincoln offered only the terms of a “conqueror,” he declared, demanding “unconditional submission to their rule.”18
That evening and three nights later Davis rose from a sickbed to give defiant speeches at mass meetings called to rally Southern morale. The Confederacy must fight on and prevail, he declared. It could never submit to the “disgrace of surrender” to “His Majesty Abraham the First.” Instead, Lincoln and Seward would find that “they had been speaking to their masters,” for Southern armies would yet “compel the Yankees, in less than twelve months, to petition us for peace on our own terms.”19 Even Davis’s critics praised these speeches. The editor of the Richmond Examiner admitted that he had never been “so much moved by the power of words.” Alexander Stephens thought Davis’s performance was “brilliant,” though he regarded the president’s forecast of military victory as “the emanation of a demented brain.”20
These meetings succeeded in reviving enthusiasm for the war, at least in Richmond. “Never before has the war spirit burned so fiercely and steadily,” exclaimed the Richmond Dispatch, while Josiah Gorgas echoed: “The war spirit has blazed out afresh.” The War Department clerk John B. Jones recorded that “every one thinks that the Confederacy will at once gather up its military strength and strike such blows as will astonish the world.”21
Several changes in the management of the war reinforced this optimism. Lee became general-in-chief at this time. James Seddon, worn out and in ill health, resigned as secretary of war and was replaced by John C. Breckinridge, who infused new energy into the War Department. One of Breckinridge’s first actions was to persuade Davis to accept the resignation of the much-maligned Lucius Northrop as commissary general and to appoint the able Isaac St. John in his place. The meager flow of rations to Lee’s army soon improved.22
But the euphoria in Richmond wore off as Sherman headed north from Savannah with the obvious purpose of cutting a destructive swath through the Carolinas and coming up on Lee’s rear in Virginia while Grant held him in a viselike grip in front. Charleston fell on February 18, when Sherman cut its communications with the interior. These developments increased the already intense pressure on Davis to restore Johnston to command of the forces concentrating in North Carolina to try to stop Sherman. Howell Cobb implored the president to “respond to the urgent—overwhelming public feeling in favor of the restoration of Genl Johnston. . . . Better that you put him in command—admitting him to be as deficient in the qualities of a General—as you or anyone else may suppose—than to resist a public sentiment—which is weakening your strength—and destroying your powers of usefulness.” Another Davis supporter acknowledged that the president had been justified in removing Johnston, but now it was necessary to reappoint him. “It would be equal to [the addition of] more than ten thousand effective men to the army. I entreat you, Mr. President, refuse no longer.”23
War Department clerk John Jones succinctly expressed Davis’s dilemma in the face of this pressure: “What will the President do, after saying [Johnston] should never have another command?” What Davis did was to produce a long memorandum, dated February 18, detailing his perception of all of Johnston’s failures and deficiencies. He intended to send it to Congress in response to resolutions by both houses calling for Johnston’s reappointment.24 But he did not send it. Instead, four days later he swallowed the bitter pill and named Johnston to the command. It was Lee who persuaded him to do so, by suggesting the fig leaf that Johnston be ordered “to report to me.” This was Lee’s one real exercise of authority as general-in-chief. “I know of no one who has so much the confidence of the troops & people as Genl Johnston,” Lee told Davis, “and I shall do all in my power to strengthen him.”25
• • •
IT WAS BEYOND LEE’S POWER TO STRENGTHEN JOHNSTON with significant reinforcements. Johnston could scrape together scarcely 20,000 effective men to confront Sherman’s 60,000, while in Virginia Lee had fewer than 60,000 to challenge Grant’s 125,000. Both Confederate armies were suffering an epidemic of desertions and absences without leave. Davis deplored this leakage, which was draining the Confederacy’s lifeblood. But many generals blamed the president himself for failing to uphold the summary executions of deserters that would discourage others from taking off. Like Lincoln, Davis pardoned or commuted the death sentences of many deserters. He hoped that clemency and an appeal to patriotism would work better than savage discipline in making men willing to fight. But this strategy did not seem to be working. And it led to one of Davis’s rare conflicts with Lee, who complained of the laxity that encouraged desertion. “I think a rigid execution of the law is mercy in the end,” wrote Lee. “The great want in our army is firm discipline.” Davis penned a biting commentary on Lee’s complaint. If the commander in chief saw fit to exercise clemency, he wrote, “that is not a proper subject for the criticism of a military commander.”26
The fact remained, however, that the Confederacy faced an acute manpower crisis in early 1865. Its armies had only 126,000 men present for duty of a total of 359,000 on its rolls. (At the same time, Union armies had 621,000 present of a total of 959,000 on the rolls.)27 In this dire state of affairs, many were prepared to consider what had previously been unthinkable—the freeing and enlisting of slaves as soldiers in the Confederate army.
Of course, slaves had always been an essential part of Confederate armies as laborers, teamsters, hospital attendants, laundresses, servants, cooks, and so on. In a message to Congress on November 27, 1863, Davis had recommended legislation to increase their number in order to release for combat many white soldiers serving in those capacities. Congress had complied; it had also repealed the draftee’s privilege of hiring a substitute and ended many occupational exemptions.28
These measures, however, failed to live up to their potential for increasing the number of combat soldiers. As early as July 1863, Davis began hearing from constituents suggesting the use of slaves as soldiers.29 A few Southern newspapers urged consideration of this radical idea. “We are forced by the necessity of our condition . . . to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war,” declared an editor in Montgomery, Alabama, in the fall of 1863. An editor in Mobile, Alabama, concurred: “It is better for us to use the negroes for our defens
e than that the Yankees should use them against us. . . . We can make them fight better than the Yankees are able to do. Masters and overseers can marshal them for battle by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are marshalled to labor.”30
Such ideas were anathema to most Confederates at that time, including Davis. When the proposal came from a significant source within the army itself, the president suppressed it. In January 1864 the best division commander in the Army of Tennessee, Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, presented a paper to his fellow officers at the army’s winter camp in Dalton, Georgia. The North was winning the war, wrote Cleburne, because of its greater resources and manpower, including the freed slaves it was recruiting into the Union army. “Slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness.” Thus the Confederacy was threatened with “the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood.” To avoid this disaster, said Cleburne, the Confederacy should enlist its own slave soldiers and “guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy.”31